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The film and broadcast production equipment company gets a better take on business analytics when it casts Pyramid as its solution.
Videndum is a leading global provider of premium hardware products and software solutions to broadcasters, film studios, production, and rental companies, photographers, independent content creators, vloggers, influencers, gamers, professional sound crews, and enterprises. Around 2,000 employees in 11 countries have helped make the company and its brands—including Vinten, Sachtler, and Litepanels—market-leading names.
The Videndum Production Solutions (VPS) division runs on two primary applications: IFS ERP software and Salesforce. Data from both hold the insights the company needs to grow, but static reports were out of date and too varied to be reliable.
“By the time the sales team got them, the information was out of date,” said Luke Dyer, Business Intelligence Developer. “The other challenge was that so many employees were creating reports, each one slightly different from the next. We weren’t singing from the same hymn sheet.”
The company had been using BI Office, an early iteration of Pyramid Analytics, along with a range of other tools, including Business Objects, Crystal Reporting, and QlikView. Something more advanced was now needed. VPS went to market looking for a BI solution that could deliver “a single source of truth” and more granular analytics.
As the upgrade from BI Office, Pyramid Analytics 2018 was always a prime contender, but the evolution of the product swung it for Dyer — especially when Pyramid added a feature he specifically had requested. “The last couple of updates have been absolutely fantastic and made my life so much easier,” he said.
With Pyramid’s Decision Intelligence platform combining data preparation, analytics, and data science, the VPS data team was able to sideline static Crystal Reports. A SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) cube is still used, built with the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack.
The priority was to make more insights available to more users in a two-part implementation. First, reports were redeveloped to make accurate insights more readily available. Second, there was a significant focus on putting dashboards in front of more users. A two-month program grouped employees and trained them on how to use the interface.
Salesforce now provides revenue and order information, which is turned into business-critical insights by Pyramid at the end of each month. Target and key performance metrics across international markets can be analyzed and used to inform strategy at speed and with a granularity that wasn’t possible before.
A VPS Quality Department that works across three sites is now able to use Pyramid to create dynamic presentations with data pulled directly from SF and IFS—something they were never able to do before. The Quality Department will soon be issued Pyramid licenses, taking the total number of users to 140. But Luke Dyer doesn’t want to stop there. “What we really want is for everybody to have a license and be able to access reports that are relevant to them,” he said.
The VPS data team achieved a lot by creating logical views of information stored in the company’s central business systems. Pyramid allowed them to advance the analytics process and create a new layer on top. Data models now connect directly to IFS and Salesforce data sources, and Pyramid turns the data into actionable insights quickly and accurately with no performance issues.
“Visibility is the number one benefit,” said Luke Dyer. “Pyramid’s Decision Intelligence platform lets salespeople see up-to-date information in half an hour to an hour every day.”
According to Dyer, speed to insight has been accelerated, and visualizations are a massive improvement. He said the look, feel, and scripting are a dramatic step up; dimensions and measures are much more advanced, and parameters for presentations are much easier to set up.
He praises the product for ease of use and the Pyramid team’s support in deploying and managing the platform: “It’s the best support from any company I’ve ever had. We had an issue a couple of months ago that got resolved in minutes. I was amazed. With any other company, it would have been days.”
There are plans to connect Pyramid directly to IFS, create live reports, and bring general ledger and inventory information into dashboards to make insights more useful to the wider business. Data science projects are also on the radar for predictive analytics. It’s the early stages of a journey, according to Dyer. “We’ve only just scratched the surface of what Pyramid can do for Videndum Production Solutions. Going forward, the possibilities are, literally, endless,” he said.
It’s the best support from any company I’ve ever had. We had an issue a couple of months ago that got resolved in minutes. I was amazed. With any other company, it would have been days.
With Pyramid Analytics, Videndum Production Solutions can:
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